The Black Scholar

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Translating Blackness

Lorgia García-Peña

To cite this article: Lorgia García-Peña (2015) Translating Blackness, The Black Scholar, 45:2,
10-20

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 Translating Blackness
Dominicans Negotiating Race and
Belonging
LORGIA GARCÍA-PEÑA
uring November 2012, more than 2
D million Dominicans living in a dozen
cities across the globe took to the streets to
peacefully protest a series of austerity
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measures imposed by the newly elected presi-
dent, Danilo Medina.1 Residing in the US
South at the time, away from any Dominican
enclave, I could not help but glue myself to
Facebook and Twitter in the hopes of partici-
pating, if only virtually, in what many
believed to be the beginning of the “Domini-
can Spring”: the transnational, youth-led
peaceful revolution that was sure to bring
about the changes that Dominicans, includ-
ing those of us in the Diaspora, had been
dreaming of our entire lives. But just like
other social movements of the decade (such
as Dreamers, Occupy, and the Arab Spring),
the Dominican Peaceful Revolution came to
a stagnant halt after a few months of inten-
sity—partly due to lack of leadership, and
partly to the silencing and repression
imposed by the Dominican state.
In my effort to stay connected to what
seemed the most exciting event in the
history of my generation, I looked at every
single photograph, listened to speeches, and
combed through all—even the minimally
relevant—news articles that circulated on
the web. It was in this laborious obsession
that I came across one picture that was
disseminated briefly on Facebook around
© 2015 The Black World Foundation
The Black Scholar 2015
Vol. 45, No. 2, 10–20, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1012993
Thanksgiving 2012. The photo showed a
man of deep brown complexion—moreno
claro, he would be called in Dominican
Republic—holding a sign that read:
“Obama, no nos ignores, nosotros también
somos negros” (Obama, don’t ignore us, we
too are black).2 Taken in Milan, Italy during
one of the smallest and less publicized of
the many marches and protests that took
place during the short-lived “Dominican
Spring,” the photo raises a series of ques-
tions.3 Why did this man, presumably a
Dominican immigrant residing in Italy, write
a slogan mentioning Obama to protest
Dominican state exploitation of the working
people? And what did race have to do with
this?
The complexity of Dominican racializa-
tion, as Torres-Saillant has argued, is precisely
linked to the fact that “the black as a socio-
logically differentiated segment of the popu-
lation does not exist in the Dominican
imagination.”4 What does exist is a series of
social injustices and inequalities that are
very much the result of the economic exploi-
tation of the majority of the population, which
is black and mulatto, by international corpor-
ations and the local government. So why then
did the Italian-Dominican protester summon
race to talk about class? Moreover, why did
he choose to invoke Barack Obama over,
let’s say, Nelson Mandela, to address what
at first sight seems to be a struggle for democ-
racy and equality?
One the most intriguing particularities of
the photograph is the diction of the slogan.
The poster uses the Spanish adjective negro
(black), which in the Dominican Republic
is more often used to describe objects
than people, over the Dominican vernacular
 prieto or moreno commonly employed to
describe a person’s skin color. Undoubtedly,
the black Italian-Dominican protester under-
stood the need to translate the oppression of
Dominican workers and migrants into a
lingua franca that would allow him to estab-
lish a dialogue with his host nation as well
as with the rest of the Western world. The
man in Milan’s performance of blackness, I
argue, derives from an awareness of “black”
as a product of US cultural, political and
economic imposition in the world. Therefore,
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to be black in the world—that is, to have
access to the discourse of social dissent that
can result in one’s positionality as an interlo-
cutor of power and history—it is necessary
to enter blackness as theorized and mediated
by the US empire. Obama’s election in 2008
further solidified blackness as a global cat-
egory that is very much part of the US liberal
and capitalist project around the world. Or,
as Cornell West stated in one of his many con-
troversial remarks, “Obama has become the
black face of American Imperialism.”5 As
enunciated in the photo, negro is thus a
literal rather than a semantic translation of
US American (politicized and commodified)
Blackness.
This essay traces the vaivén (coming and
going) of Dominican blackness, engaging
the movements, translations, and negotiations
of racial ideology across markets and nations,
to better understand the contradictions that
have led to multiple scholarly and cultural
misreadings of Dominican racialization.
Jorge Duany, analyzing Puerto Rican transna-
tional experiences, argues that the Puerto
Rican nation is one in constant vaivén, for it
negotiates identity and nationalism through
local and global politics.6 Drawing from
Duany I argue Dominican blackness must
also be understood in terms of movement—
as a vaivén—that is, as a trans-local concept
very much linked to historical, cultural and
political continuities.
As articulated after the Civil War, US
blackness became an important tool in the
project of US imperial expansion over Hispa-
niola, adding to the already complicated con-
ceptualizations of race and nation(s) that
marked the birth of the two republics inhab-
iting the island. Dominican blackness is thus
related to the complicated vaivén of peoples
and ideas that shaped and sustained the econ-
omic and political expansion of the US
Empire over Latin America after the Civil
War. Furthermore, the present reality of
Dominican migration, which has led more
than 10 percent of the overall Dominican
population to move to the United States
continues to transform how blackness is
imagined, understood and performed by
Dominicans at home and abroad.
Overcoming Blackness
Dominican blackness is an embodied
concept that is performed, and inscribed on
the flesh of national subjects through social
processes that are very much linked to the pol-
itical and economic realities of the nation in
its relationship to the history and persistence
presence of colonial (Spain) and imperial
(US) impositions. Analyzed outside of the
complicated historical context that engen-
dered it, blackness in the Dominican Repub-
lic can become a slippery concept. The
critic of Dominican blackness, therefore,
runs the risk of staying on the surface and
missing the point. To avoid following in
Lorgia García-Peña 11
 such “colonizing trick,” to borrow from David
Kazanjian, the critic must understand that the
task of translating blackness is intrinsically
linked to Dominican ethnic identity and to
the island’s economic and political nego-
tiations with the United States and Europe.7
Within the first three decades of Spanish
colonization, the native population of Hispa-
niola was reduced to 11,000.8 Such destruc-
tion resulted mainly from the hardships of
the mining industry for which the indigenous
people had become the main source of
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forced labor. As early as 1520, African
slaves were brought to Santo Domingo to
replace the disappearing native Taíno work-
force, beginning what would become the
largest and most important economic
exchange of the modern world: the African
slave trade. Ginetta Candelario argues that
this development had a significant impact
on how people in the colony organized and
imagined themselves along racial lines,
because racial systems frequently shifted
due to the short duration of the sugar planta-
tion economy and to the occupation of
the western part of the island by French
colonizers.9
But as early as 1608, the Spanish colony of
Santo Domingo began to see what some his-
torians have called a “de facto emancipa-
tion.”10 Looking for fortune in the richer
lands of New Spain (now Mexico and the
US southwest), many Spanish colonizers
abandoned Santo Domingo from which
much gold, silver, and richness had been
extracted. The wealthy colonos sailed to
new territories, leaving behind a few sugar
plantations and scattered communities of
cattle ranchers and farmers who survived
through commerce and contraband with
12 TBS • Volume 45 • Number 2 • Summer 2015
French and Dutch seamen, pirates, and
explorers beginning to take interest in the
region.
To control the growth of the illegal market
and contraband in the colony Governor
Antonio de Osorio, following an order from
King Felipe III, ordered residents to abandon
the northwest lands and to relocate closer to
the city of Santo Domingo, where illegal
exports could be controlled. Known as the
Devastaciones de Osorio (1605–6), this
period resulted in the speedy economic
decline of Santo Domingo and in the
increased discontent among the island’s
cattle ranchers and middle-class residents.11
Fearing rebellion and secession, Spain sent
troops to protect its colonial interests—a fact
that contributed to widespread armed rebel-
lion of whites, wealthy mulattoes, and
slaves. Unable to defeat the Spanish army,
white and rich mulatto rebels migrated to
other islands, while slave and poor mulattoes
took to the mountains, leaving the majority of
the northwestern plains de-populated.12
Eventually, the French would gain control
over these lands, converting western Santo
Domingo into one of richest colonies of the
Caribbean with one of the largest slave popu-
lations in the New World.
Among the many unintended conse-
quences of the Devastaciones was the
freedom (either by release or rebellion) of
nearly 60 percent of the population of
African slaves working in the cattle industry
of northwestern Santo Domingo, and the sub-
sequent increased mestizaje among blacks,
Indians, and poor whites who took to the
montes (wilderness) in armed resistance,
never to return to their homes.13 Writing in
1857, Pedro Francisco Bonó argues that free
 blacks and mulattoes who escaped to the
mountains during the Devastaciones gradu-
ally began to understand themselves as differ-
ent from black slaves of neighboring Saint
Domingue.14 These free mixed-race commu-
nities eventually started to use other names
and descriptions to assert their difference
from both the European colonizers and the
African slaves. Interesting terms such as
blancos de la tierra (whites of the land) and
moreno oscuro (dark brown) emerged as a
result of this socioeconomic phenomenon.15
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Historians of the language differ in their
opinions of the genealogy and chronology of
the various terms that eventually came to
replace negro in Santo Domingo and of
those invented to depict the various grada-
tions of skin color among descendants of
slaves. What does seem evident is that
though colonial Dominicans eventually
stopped using the term “black” to describe
their epidermis, they were aware of the
racial hierarchies and the legal implications
of their skin color in the context of colonial
Santo Domingo. Or to use Moya Pons’
diction, “they knew they were black”;
however, colonial Dominicans of color
understood their blackness as a condition
that, though oppressive and disadvantageous,
was not equal to slavery.16 More importantly,
they understood themselves as natives of, and
belonging to, the land of Santo Domingo and
not solely as descendants of African slaves.
In the aftermath of the Devastaciones,
slavery came to be perceived as something
that could be overcome through miscegena-
tion. Lighter skin allowed for freedom and the
possibility of escalating the socioeconomic
ladder. Despite their aspirations to mulataje, I
would argue that colonial Dominicans of the
seventeenth century also understood they
were ethnically black; that is, that they were
partly descendants of African slaves. This
awareness inspired communities of free
Dominicans of color to aid runaway slaves
from both sides of the island for almost two
centuries.17 The notion of “overcoming black-
ness” became a simple strategy for fighting
colonial oppression and slavery in seven-
teenth-century Santo Domingo.
After Dominican independence from Haiti
in 1844, the strategy for avoiding the social
and legal costs of blackness were slowly trans-
formed. Facing the need to negotiate US
imperial demands and nationalist goals,
republican writers drafted a series of contra-
dictory ideologies that ultimately mistrans-
lated popular understandings of race into a
form of indigenismo that erased blackness
from the national rhetoric.18 What survived
of the original idea was a distorted notion of
“bettering one’s race” that was devoid of the
historical meaning that had allowed
runaway slaves and mulattoes of seven-
teenth-century Santo Domingo to resist
slavery and exploitation. Progressively, as
Candelario argues, the term “black” became
associated with the idea of slavery, and so
mixed people of color in Santo Domingo
began to imagine themselves as other than
black.19
The early republic indigenista narrative
was further complicated as the Dominican
nation grappled with its own borders and its
place in a US-dominated hemisphere. As
Sybille Fisher argues, Haiti had been con-
structed and imagined as a black—not a
racially mixed—nation.20 The United States,
on the other hand, had managed to obtain
independence while maintaining a slave
Lorgia García-Peña 13
 economy. For both nations, Haiti and the
United States, blackness was an important
political category in the definition of the
national project. As I argue elsewhere, the for-
mation of Dominican national identity was
mediated through the nation’s relationship to
its geographical (Haiti) and psychological
(US) borders. Thus, in order to assert its inde-
pendence from Haiti, and to obtain the favor
of the United States, the Dominican Republic
needed to be decidedly non-black.21
Within this historical framework, the word
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“negro” or black was perpetually erased from
Dominican racial vocabulary. To be black
became equated to foreignness (Haiti) and
not belonging, perpetuating a system of
what Balibar has called “racism without
race.”22 At the hands of the powerful Trujillo
dictatorship (1930–61), this ideology of
racism without race was converted into
action: school curricula were standardized
to reproduce a version of the nation’s history
that was shaped by Hispanophile intellectuals
and therefore promoted anti-Haitian ideology
and xenophobia; Afro-Dominican religious
and cultural practices were persecuted and
banned; and in the most vicious example of
xenophobia, Afro-Dominicans and ethnic
Haitians were viciously massacred.23
Though in the twentieth century Dominicans
continue to imagine themselves as non-
white (non-European), being black—that is,
admitting one’s relationship to colonial
oppression and slavery—became incompati-
ble with being Dominican.
The Vaivén of Blackness
In the previous section we established that for
Dominicans in the colonial and early republic
14 TBS • Volume 45 • Number 2 • Summer 2015
years, the term negro carried the signifier of
exclusion, for it was legally and historically
linked to slavery and foreignness. I now turn
my attention to an examination of the vaivén
of blackness that came to sustain dominicani-
dad as an ethno-racial category inhabiting a
liminal border between US imperial imagin-
ation and colonial ideology.
The history of US black liberation is very
much intertwined with the history of Hispa-
niola’s independence projects. The site for
the emergence of two black- and mulatto-
led republics (Haiti in 1804 and the Domini-
can Republic in 1821), Hispaniola became
an international locus for black resistance
and liberation as well as the object of fear
for Europe and the United States.24 At the
very beginning of the Haitian Revolution
thousands of French planters fled from the
island, taking refuge in the United States and
many taking slaves with them.25 By 1792,
more than 200 white Saint-Domingue
families had moved to Philadelphia.26 Fol-
lowing the fall of Cap Français in 1793, the
number of refugees increased daily, to a rate
of 10,000 per day. Most went to the United
States in the hopes of continuing to participate
in a slave-driven economy.27
With these figures in mind, we could
reasonably argue that migration from Saint-
Domingue influenced early abolitionist
efforts and black insurgency in the nine-
teenth- century United States. An example
can be found in the Gabriel Conspiracy
(1800), a plan by enslaved African American
slaves to attack Richmond and destroy
slavery in Virginia and which “Frenchmen”
allegedly orchestrated.28 Another example is
the famous Vesey Plot of Charleston (1822),
in which the accused mentioned the Haitian
 Revolution as their inspiration for insur-
gency.29 In addition to inspiring armed resist-
ance, the Santo Domingo Revolutions also
impacted early articulations of US black pol-
itical thought. Nineteenth-century African
American scholars such as Holly, Douglass,
and Delany, as well as early twentieth-
century thinkers like W.E.B. Dubois and
Arturo Schomburg, located in the Santo
Domingo slave rebellions the spirit of liberty
and freedom needed to fight for the equality
of races.30 Holly would eventually join the
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emigration efforts that led many black Ameri-
cans to Liberia, but it was Hispaniola, not
Africa, he found to be the ideal destination
for southern black émigrés. Between 1823
and 1898, as many as 20,000 black Ameri-
cans emigrated to the southern part of Cap
Haïtien and to the Bay of Samaná, eventually
forming communities and influencing the
culture and history of both nations of
Hispaniola.31
During the second half of the nineteenth
century, blackness was an important category
in the definition of the United States’ destiny.
A nation that was built at the expense of black
people’s freedom now had to figure out a way
to redefine itself as multiracial, facing its great
crime and finding ways to deal with the
trauma of slavery. In this atmosphere—
which coincides with the progression of the
Manifest Destiny, and the growth of the
“White Man’s Burden” ideology in Washing-
ton—US discourse of blackness (which, as
established above, emerged in dialogue with
Hispaniola) begins to travel to Hispaniola
through political and cultural imperialism.
The US government made several attempts
to annex the Dominican Republic after its
independence from Haiti (1854, 1866, and
1868). The annexation efforts responded to
the United States’ desire to acquire a naval
base in the Caribbean to strengthen its politi-
cal and economic power in the region.
Frederick Douglass, who joined the
Republican Party and participated amply in
the imperial project, was appointed to the
Commission of Inquiry for the Annexation of
Santo Domingo, in 1871.32 Douglass, an ex-
slave and great defendant of racial equality,
actively participated in a project that would
end the sovereignty of a nation ruled by
African descendants. Reconciling his desire
for equality and justice and his idea of a cohe-
sive nation, Douglass got behind Manifest
Destiny. He believed that in order for the
black race to move forward, it needed the
support and strength of a strong nation and
its leaders. Viewing the Dominican Republic
as crippled by caudillismo, Douglass believed
that “Santo Domingo could not survive on its
own” but could be great as part of the Great
United States Empire.33 Some critics of Dou-
glass find his position naïve and overly opti-
mistic. Others consider him a sellout to “Big
Money” and Washington. Whatever Dou-
glass’ true intentions were regarding the
annexation of Santo Domingo, his under-
standing of blackness is intriguing. Douglass
never may have encountered a Dominican
person who identified as black, given the
sociolinguistic context of the term. Yet it is
clear that for Douglass, Dominicans were
indeed black, a fact that decidedly impacted
his mission and presence on Dominican soil.
Douglass believed Santo Domingo would
be a refuge for African American professionals
and scholars seeking to escape the oppression
of the post–Civil War United States to develop
their full potential as humans: “This is a place
Lorgia García-Peña 15
 where the man can simply be man regardless
of his skin color. Where he can be free to
think, and to lead.”34 But Douglass was not
the first American to describe the Dominican
people as a non-black racial Other. The
1845 US commission in charge of assessing
Dominicans’ ability to self-govern found
Dominicans to be “neither black nor
white.”35 Assuaging public anxiety surround-
ing the potential emergence of another black
nation, both commissions (in 1845 led by
white American diplomat John Hogan and
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in 1875 by Douglass) insisted on the differ-
ence of Dominican blackness as a positive
category offering potential for the country’s
progress, in contrast with neighboring
(black) Haiti.
Though Douglass found Dominican racial
mixtures promising, particularly as compared
to Haiti, we should note that he also found
Dominicans to be generally uncivil and in
need of much guidance and teaching. Con-
sciously or not, Douglass, the voice of black
thought in US politics of the late nineteenth
century, established US blackness as an auth-
ority for determining the racial, political, and
cultural implications of blackness in Hispa-
niola, a legacy that continues to date.36 If
white Americans like Hogan were endowed
with the power to govern and instruct
young nations, black Americans, Douglass’
actions seem to suggest, had the burden of
teaching other blacks how to be black,
civil, and free. In this framework, which
would be expanded to the rest of the Hispa-
nic Caribbean after the Spanish American
War, we can find the roots of the complicated
vaivén of Dominican blackness as a theory
that is very much intertwined with the econ-
omic and political ambitions of expansionist
16 TBS • Volume 45 • Number 2 • Summer 2015
post–Civil War United States, a process that
has continued to grow and shape the internal
and external constructions of Dominican
blackness.
By the time Frederick Douglass visited the
Dominican Republic in 1875, Caribbean
thinkers such as Gregorio Luperón, Jose
Martí, and Ramón Emeterio Betances had
begun to grapple with the political articula-
tion of race that could ensure the sustenance
of the national project while serving as the
basis for an egalitarian international commu-
nity. Imagining a Confederación Antillana
(Caribbean Federation) of democratic actors,
the patriots and fathers of the Dominican
Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba had been
preoccupied with the threat that the United
States posed to their independence projects.
As imagined by Luperón, Betances and
Martí, the nation could only exist in the
unity of all races without discrimination or
hierarchy. Racism and racial segregation cor-
responded to a colonial imagination. To be
racist, therefore, meant to be a colonizer.
While the nation as imagined by these thin-
kers was charged with the protection of its
subjects, citizens, in exchange, were asked
to give up their race and become part of the
nation. In this model, nation supersedes
race. To claim one’s race would constitute
treachery, an unpatriotic gesture reminiscent
of colonialism.
Martí, Betances, and Luperón were at the
forefront of the struggle for emancipation
and racial integration in the Hispanic Carib-
bean. Recognizing the threat that US expan-
sion posed for the region, they understood
the importance of strengthening unity
among the peoples of their nation to guaran-
tee the longevity of the independence
 project. Recent history had proven that the
fragility of race could result in loss of liberty,
as had happened repeatedly in the case of
Santo Domingo. Though there are not many
sources on the Dominican intellectual reac-
tion to Frederick Douglass’ support of the
annexation, Luperón’s 1875 editorial pub-
lished in El Porvenir, “A los Dominicanos y
a mis amigos Todos,” seems to suggest that
he recognized the dangers of potential
“foreign” projects in de-stabilizing national
unity. Thus, he reminds his compatriots and
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friends of their need to be “loyal to our Father-
land, and our freedom over any other promis-
ing prize.”37 Though Luperón was friends
with Douglass and welcomed him in the
Puerto Plata political circle during his visits,
he disagreed with Douglass’ political ambi-
tions and vision for the island. His article
thus reminds Dominicans of the potential
danger foreign voices, even those represent-
ing amicable forces, posed for the sovereignty
of the young nation.
To return to the man in Milan and my orig-
inal question: What does race have to do with
the austerity measures and taxation of the
working Dominican people in 2012? The
study of race has dominated the bulk of aca-
demic work about Dominicans at home and
in the diaspora. US and European scholarship
has focused largely on border relations, on
anti-Haitian discourse, and on what some
regard as Dominican “black denial,” often
juxtaposed with an assumed Haitian
embrace of blackness.38 On the other hand,
contemporary Dominican and Dominican
American scholarship has focused on the
influence of diasporic intellectual, cultural,
and political interventions on island ideol-
ogies of race and gender. One could say that
diasporic intellectuals and cultural producers
have been seeking to deconstruct the colonial
imagination that informed the division of
Haiti and the Dominican Republic in
the nineteenth century and that influenced
the racist discourse dominating twentieth-
century Dominican political ideology.
In what is now a famous quote, historian
Frank Moya Pons argued that in the United
States, Dominicans “realize they are
black.”39 Critiquing this provocative idea,
Torres-Saillant argues that Dominicans in the
United States are confronted with new forms
of racism and are therefore forced to make
ethnic alliances with other racialized min-
orities.40 Though I find Moya Pons’ analysis
simplistic, I would concede that in the
diaspora many Dominicans are indeed con-
fronted with a different type of discrimination
than the one they face at home. In the United
States, it is not just class, but also skin tone,
hair texture, accent, education, level of cul-
tural assimilation, and ability to participate
in the purchase of cultural commodities that
define one’s race. Thus, confronted with a
US racialization that is very much linked to
the open wound of slavery and Jim Crow as
foundational experiences of the nation, US
diasporic Dominicans find that blackness pro-
vides a language for confronting their new
place in their host nation while interpellating
the historical oppression back home. It is not
then that Dominicans “find out they are
black” when they migrate to the United
States, as Moya Pons suggested, but rather,
that in the United States Dominicans find a
political language from which to articulate
their own experience of racialization, oppres-
sion, disenfranchisement, and silencing—a
process that allows them to build alliances
Lorgia García-Peña 17
 with other oppressed communities around the
world.
In his book Afrodominicano por elección,
negro por nacimiento, race scholar Blas
Jiménez calls for the literal translation of
dominicanidad to the internationally recog-
nizable label “black” and for the embracing
of the prefix “Afro” as a strategy to dialogue
with the common histories that have engen-
dered black experience in the Americas.41
As if responding to Jiménez’s call to action,
the slogan “we too are black” chosen by the
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man in Milan, serves as a signifier from
which to theorize and historicize dominicani-
dad in terms that could be understood, vali-
dated, and accepted by a large transnational
audience. Further, it locates the Dominican
experience in relation to the United States,
serving as a reminder of the two nations’ intri-
cate histories of unequal relationship.
The man in Milan understood that the
adjective “negro/black” possesses a certain
transnational value that the ethnic identifi-
cation “Dominican” or the Spanish semantic
translations “prieto/moreno” do not. The
man in Milan recognized negro to be a
powerful artifact for political contestation as
well as a global signifier of economic oppres-
sion and disenfranchisement. For most people
in the world, “black,” just like dominicano, is
equated with poor. Unlike dominicano,
however, “black” is historically and culturally
situated in the world. One can argue that
“black” as a cultural and political category is
visible and, to inflect Gayatri Spivak, can
indeed speak.
The notion of race as a social construct has
been widely accepted in scholarly conversa-
tions for several decades now, to the extent
that the phrase has become academic
18 TBS • Volume 45 • Number 2 • Summer 2015
cliché. The meaning of race as a social con-
struct, however, is not always clear, as the
phrase does not account for the empirical
experience of subjects negotiating racial iden-
tity in an increasingly transnational word. In
other words, the “social construction of
race” does not provide a solution to institutio-
nalized racism, white supremacy, and the
everyday life struggles faced by racialized
peoples of the world. The “social construction
of race” does not account for the vaivén of
blackness, but that theoretical phrase
assumes blackness to be locally contained
within its construction.
In his engagement of blackness, the man in
Milan is both interpellating and contradicting
dominicanidad for negro, attempting to
contest oppression through a theorization of
blackness that is very much contaminated
by the imperial structures sustaining
(black) Dominican oppression. The alterna-
tive, however, is the continued silencing of
Dominican economic exploitation by the
state and international corporations and the
racialization of the immigrant subject as an
Other without history. The man in Milan,
like many of us in the diaspora, has chosen
blackness, hoping to find in it a language
that would bring the racial justice and
equality the majority of Dominicans have
been fighting for over several centuries.
Notes
1. The 2012 Fiscal Reform Law 253-12 intro-
duced by Medina in the late fall and popularized
as “el paquetazo” (the blow) sought to alleviate
the fiscal crisis affecting the nation by an overarch-
ing increase of taxes and the imposition of new
 taxation on items traditionally exempt, such as
food, baby formula and medication.
2. I have made many attempts to locate the
photograph; however, as of the moment in which
this article was completed, I have been
unsuccessful.
3. La Multitud. Twitter post, November 20,
2012. https://twitter.com/LaMultitud/status/26947
5754692190208.
4. Silvio Torres-Saillant, Introduction to
Dominican Blackness (New York: CUNY Domini-
can Studies Institute, City College of New York,
1999), 25.
Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 16:08 29 November 2015
5. Cornell West, Black Prophetic Power
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014).
6. Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on
the Move: Identities on the Island and in the
United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Car-
olina Press, 2002), vii.
7. David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick:
National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early
America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003).
8. Ginetta Candelario, Black Behind the Ears:
Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to
Beauty Shops (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007), 13.
9. Candelario, Black Behind the Ears, 37.
10. See Frank Moya Pons, El Pasado Domini-
cano (Santo Domingo: Editoria Corripia, 1986),
and Richard Lee Turits, The Foundations of Despot-
ism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity
in Dominican History (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2003).
11. There were many causes of the Devasta-
ciones. Firstly, there were economic causes.
Spain was trying to maintain a monopoly on com-
merce with the colonies and contraband affected
this plan. On the other hand, Spain understood
contraband as a source of economic power for its
enemies.
12. One of the most important of these rebel-
lions was the one led by mulatto cattle rancher
Hernando Montero in La Yaguana in 1606,
known as the Guaba Rebellion.
13. Antonio Sánchez Valverde, Ensayos (Santo
Domingo: Ediciones de la Fundación Corripio,
1988), 46.
14. Pedro Francisco Bonó Papers, 1857; Emilio
Rodríguez Demorizzi Collection, Santo Domingo.
15. Moya Pons, El Pasado Dominicano, 8.
16. Frank Moya Pons, Manual de historia de la
República Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Carib-
bean, 2000), 25.
17. The constant preoccupation regarding the
potential alliance of the races appears in the
scarce documents of the years following the
Devastaciones. The sentiment becomes evident
in seventeenth-century legislation, including the
Code Noir.
18. Indigenismo was a social and literary
movement in Latin America that began during the
second half of the nineteenth century and contin-
ued to develop throughout early- and mid-twenti-
eth-century literature. Indigenismo sought to
highlight the cultures and histories of the Native
populations through the narration of indigenous
pre-colonial past. In the Dominican Republic,
Manuel de Jesus Galvan’s novel Enriquillo (1879)
was the most important indigenista novel of the
nineteenth century alongside the poetic work of
Salome Ureña and Félix María del Monte.
19. Candelario, Black Behind the Ears, 23.
20. Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti
and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 164.
21. Lorgia García Peña, Contradicting the
Archive: Bodies, Nations and the Narration of
Dominicanidad (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, forthcoming).
22. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice
Wallerstein, Race, nation, classe: Les identités ambi-
guës (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1988), 34.
23. In 1937, more than 15,000 people, mostly
black Dominicans and Haitians, living in the north-
west borderlands were massacred following an
Lorgia García-Peña 19
 order by Trujillo. Over the last 20 years, this event
has gained significant international attention,
becoming a locus for analyzing Dominican-
Haitian border relations in light of race and ethni-
city. See Turits, The Foundations of Despotism;
Eugenio Matibag, Haitian-Dominican Counter-
point: Nation, State, and Race on Hispaniola
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Ber-
nardo Vega, Trujillo y Haití, 2 vols (Santo
Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana,
1988, 1995).
24. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 17.
25. Mary Treudley, “The United States and
Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 16:08 29 November 2015
34. Douglass, Life and Times, 398.
35. Sumner Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard: The
Dominican Republic (1844–1924) (1928; repr.,
Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1966), 77–8.
36. In his 2012 PBS documentary, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. avows Dominicans’ black denial. After
observing passersby in the busy Calle El Conde in
Santo Domingo, the scholar expressed his disap-
proval of Dominican racial constructions, insisting
that in the United States “all these people would be
black.” In contrast, Gates presented Haiti as a
source of black authenticity and African pride in
the Americas, and as a victim of what he perceived

Santo Domingo, 1789–1866," Journal of Race to be Dominican racial prejudice.

Development 7 (July 1916): 112.
26. Monroe Fordham, “Nineteenth Century
Black Thought in the United States: Some Influence
of the Santo Domingo Revolution,” Journal of Black
Studies 6 (1975): 116.
27. Treudley, “United States and Santo
Domingo,” 112, 113.
28. Ibid.
29. Fordham, “Nineteenth Century Black
Thought,” 175.
30. Ibid., 120.
31. Ibid.
32. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass (1881; repr., Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, 2003), 410.
33. Daniel Brantley, “Black Diplomacy and
Frederick Douglass’ Caribbean Experiences, 1871
and 1889–1891: The Untold History,” Phylon 45,
no. 3 (1984): 203.
37. Gregorio Luperón, Escritos de Gregorio
Luperón (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional,
1935), 164.
38. This dichotomy is found in the works of
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michelle Wucker, Ernesto
Sagas, David Howard, and others.
39. Frank Moya Pons, “Dominican National
Identity and Return Migration,” in Migration and
Caribbean Cultural Identity: Selected Papers from
Conference Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of
the Center (Gainesville: Center for Latin American
Studies, University of Florida, 1982), 33.
40. Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of
Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,”
Latin American Perspectives 25, no. 3 (May
1998): 5.
41. Blas R. Jiménez, Afrodominicano por
elección, negro por nacimiento: Seudoensayos
(Santo Domingo: Editora Manatí, 2008), 114.

Lorgia García-Peña is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of History and
Literature at Harvard University and co-founder of Freedom University Georgia. She specializes in
Latino/Latina studies and Hispanic Caribbean literary and cultural studies, with a focus on the Domin-
ican Republic and its Diaspora. Her research examines marginality, migration, and racial and ethnic
identity formation. Her book, Archiving Contradiction: Bodies, Nations and the Production of Domin-
icanidad, is under contract with Duke University Press.

20 TBS • Volume 45 • Number 2 • Summer 2015